Potentially serious and untoward medical problems can occur when a pharmacist inadvertently dispenses a wrong drug because of inability to read what is often virtually illegible handwritten medical prescriptions. The present invention provides an alternative way to create accurate and legible medical prescriptions to ensure that drugs are dispensed as prescribed. This greatly benefits pharmacists and patients alike. Computerized medical prescription creation and management systems have been proposed in the past, but these systems have not found wide-spread acceptance because they have been time consuming and often required input into multiple computers or transfer of data into other computers before the prescription was complete. In view of the fact that time constraints are of importance to medical personnel, this invention serves to make the prescription completion process as quick and efficient as possible through the use of a hand held, self-contained device.
The invention applies speech recognition software to convert the voice input of the medical personnel into a printed prescription. Voice and sound recognition devices are disclosed in: U.S. Pat. No. 5,812,882 issued Sep. 22, 1998; U.S. Pat. No. 5,729,694 issued Mar. 17, 1998; U.S. Pat. No. 4,435,617 issued Mar. 6, 1984; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,392,409 issued Jul. 12, 1983. Prior prescription creation and management systems are described in patent Nos.: U.S. Pat. No. 5,845,255 issued Dec. 1, 1998; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,737,539 issued Apr. 7, 1998.